Birth Control: A Letter to the Young Women of 2017

It was the summer of 1963, Martha and the Vandellas’ “Love Is Like a Heat Wave” blasted from every transistor radio on the Jersey Shore, and truer words were never sung. Without planning to, I lost my virginity under a beach blanket late one afternoon. I was 18; he was 19. Our dicey method of birth control (withdrawal and fingers crossed!) was superior to those employed by plenty of other teenagers at the time, like my friend whose accoutrements of choice were Saran Wrap and Coca-Cola. Guys could get someone who looked old enough to be married to buy them condoms; the fad was to keep one in your wallet, creating a studly bulge while it deteriorated in its leather sandwich. In most states, contraceptives couldn’t be advertised for their actual purpose—they were marketed as “hygiene.” I’ll say again: This was 1963, not 1863.

A year and a knuckle-biting late-period scare later, I had a new boyfriend. I was going to college in New York, and I was determined to get a prescription for something people mysteriously called…the Pill. The Pill wasn’t perfect; women in Puerto Rico had been used as guinea pigs during its testing phase, and some experienced side effects—most notably an increased risk of blood clots. And procuring it was a little like scoring drugs. I discreetly asked around, and a friend gave me the name of a doctor in Manhattan who was reputed to be sympathetic. Per my friend’s instructions, I lied and said I was 21 and engaged to be married soon. It worked, and my life as an autonomous adult thus began.

By the time I was having sex, the American birth control movement had actually been around for half a century. Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger and her sister Ethel Byrne opened the first birth control clinic in the United States (in Brooklyn) in 1916, in defiance of laws that forbade even telling another person where to obtain contraception. After she was arrested and convicted, Byrne was sentenced to serve time in a workhouse, where she went on a hunger strike and was force-fed. At Sanger’s trial, her lawyers argued that what she was doing was justified because her clients feared dying in childbirth. The judge, in 1917, ruled explicitly that women did not have “the right to copulate with a feeling of security that there will be no resulting conception.”

I was lucky I wasn’t in Connecticut, where birth control was illegal even for married couples until 1965, when the Supreme Court, in Griswold v. Connecticut, ruled that contraception was a matter of marital privacy. It wasn’t until 1972 that the court extended the right to single people. That case involved an activist, William Baird, who handed a condom and a pack of contraceptive foam to a 19-year-old female Boston University student. His act was a felony in Massachusetts not only because she was unmarried but because he wasn’t a doctor or a registered pharmacist.

I am wondering if any of these facts surprise you. My younger friends seem to know all about back-alley coat-hanger abortions before Roe v. Wade, but not so much about the simultaneous struggle for access to birth control.

Although I later discovered that a number of women I knew (including both of my grandmothers) had illegally terminated pregnancies, I would not have had the faintest idea of how to find someone to perform an abortion in 1963. It would have been like trying to find Banksy or Anonymous today. Where would you even start? There were rumors at my college of some kindly old doctor somewhere in Pennsylvania who could help you out, but to track him down would have entailed following every kindly old man around town, sussing out whether he carried a black doctor’s bag, and then asking him if he would perform an abortion. While hoping he wasn’t a cop. If you hadn’t used birth control or your birth control had suffered wallet death, an unwanted pregnancy usually meant shame and scandal, dropping out of school, and having a child. Several friends of mine who got pregnant in that era and couldn’t procure abortions gave up their babies for adoption. Most of the pregnant girls I knew had to get married, including one who was knocked up at 17.

This dynamic was the inescapable backdrop of male-female relationships in that era: Even if you ultimately never conceived, becoming heterosexually active meant understanding that the best possible outcome of your desire might be a man graciously putting a ring on your finger in order to save you from public shame, a few clicks removed from a scarlet letter. It was not a recipe for fearless passion between equals. Safe, reliable birth control for women drastically changed the equation.

Much later, I would look at all these things through the lens of feminism.

The personal is political.

Keep your laws off my body.

My body belongs to me (but I share).

(This last one I had on a T-shirt.) But at the time, we lacked the language to look at the big picture and see that some things happened to women because we were women. At the time, I was focused on the personal: I really, really wanted a career in journalism, and it would have been hopelessly thwarted if I were a teenage mother.

I had been on the Pill for four years when I first encountered the fledgling women’s movement…and inadvertently invented bra-burning.

Birth control had not solved all my problems. I had married boyfriend number two, graduated from college, and been turned down for a job as a reporter at a newspaper after the interviewer grilled me about what contraceptive method my husband and I were using—and then shushed away my reassurances with the suggestion that “a pretty little thing like you ought to be home having a baby every year.” I subsequently worked as a reporter at a wire service, left my husband for boyfriend number three, and in the summer of 1968 was hired by the New York Post, which was then a punchy but liberal paper. It was my dream job.

A few weeks later, the city desk received a press release from a group of women who planned to picket the Miss America pageant in Atlantic City. They also wanted to light a fire in a “Freedom Trash Can” on the boardwalk and toss in girdles, corsets, bras, high heels, hair curlers, Playboy magazines, and other symbols of enforced femininity. It’s hard to convey nearly a half century later how bizarre this seemed. “The Sixties” were exploding, but not for women. Our new freedom to avoid pregnancy, for example, had devolved into an expectation of constant sexual availability; a meme of the day, as counterculture guys burned their draft cards and refused to fight in Vietnam, was that “girls say yes to boys who say no.”

In mainstream America, meanwhile, the pageant was revered. Prancing around in a bathing suit and stilettos was an admirable life path for girls, the equivalent of a boy knowing he could grow up to be president. (My uncle had tried to persuade me to go for the Miss New Jersey tiara.) My editors sent me off to write a humorous article about these deluded protesters.

But everything they said made absolute sense to me. Equal rights? Not being judged solely by rigid beauty standards? Ding, ding, ding. In what we would now call intersectionality, they also linked the pageant to the unpopular Vietnam War (the reigning queen’s duties included entertaining the troops) and the fact that there had never been a black contestant. I was determined to take the protesters seriously.

The lead of my article thus compared their bonfire plans to the noble torching of draft cards. “Bra-burning” was more alliterative than
my other choices, and I went with it. In fact, the demonstrators couldn’t get a fire permit, as it turned out, and—small bit of history here—no bras were ever actually burned. The headline writer picked it up, as did every other media outlet in the days that followed. No one much concentrated on draft-card burners or politics in general. Feminism was suddenly mostly about underwear. Or jiggly boobs. A myth was born.

Over the years, I’ve seen that just about every sexual decision a woman might make can be commodified, vilified, or reduced to a cartoon—whether it’s bralessness, liking to wear makeup and fuck-me shoes (or not), girl-on-girl action, public breastfeeding, being a madonna or a whore, being a MILF or not wanting to be a mother right now—or maybe ever.

And I’ve learned that what matters more is what we think about ourselves. For my generation, legal access to birth control was kick-ass revolutionary. It put us in a place of independence to demand more, and better.

Those who don’t want you empowered know this. Don’t ever let them turn back the clock.